Doubleback
by John Bigboote
Summary: I was going to call this Here Comes the Rain Again, but I was watching Back to the Future Part III the other day, so…


"_Whoever she was, I must have scared the Living Daylights out of her."_

\- Timothy Dalton

"_It's a microwave! You use it to punish food that has been bad."_

\- A Hat in Time

"_But why isn't she in a washing machine?"_

\- Something a guy on GameFAQs said after I posted pictures of the Lunavero Tsugumi cosplayer

* * *

The girl who thought she was the greatest hacker in history found herself in the spotlight, but it wasn't quite the spotlight she wanted. Her personally-calibrated paw pads glided across a two-dimensional keyboard as she typed dozens of commands in a matter of seconds. The cylindrical walls of the foreign operator hub surrounding her blinked green and white like millions of tiny square eyes.

The holographic console in front of her was filled with jumbled machine code like a hexadecimal crossword puzzle. Tsugumi changed her method of attack every few seconds and quickly typed in a different programming command. The console refreshed into a solid red rectangle and showed the same results every time.

_[ACCESS DENIED – AREA RESTRICTED]_

"_Oh, come on. This is an easy one," _Ada impatiently buzzed through the microphone in Tsugumi's ear. Ada was, for all practical purposes, GHQ's own in-house version of Tsugumi. Smug, sultry, Tsugumi's senior by at least a couple of years, and dangerously proficient with anything involving information systems. A brunette virtual vixen who was technically paid by GHQ but really only worked for herself, Ada was basically all of Tsugumi's bad traits with none of the friendliness or humanity to hide it.

She was also Tsugumi's boss for the current operation, tasked with constantly whispering in Tsugumi's ear from her own separate command hub, ensuring her unwitting recruit would be worth the company's time. The panther had her claws firmly grasping the kitten's tail.

The mobile command hub Tsugumi was standing inside might as well have been a walk-in refrigerator. The interface was cold and utilitarian; perfectly equipped to get the job done but barely designed for user ease. The backdrop had the aforementioned millions-of-eyes-looking-at-me problem that made it near impossible for her to calm down and concentrate. The new hub had the symptoms of something designed by people who had more money to spend but only had a rudimentary understanding of how her old one really worked.

It was a shame the old one had been utterly obliterated during her capture several days ago. Funeral Parlor's outpost had been overrun in a surprise ambush by undercover GHQ soldiers. Tsugumi's final communications made sure Aya and the other Endlave pilots managed to safely escape, but Tsugumi herself was left behind. She was stripped out of her hub like a bad RAM chip on a circuit board. The only things she'd brought with her as a prisoner were her mission suit, her pointed headphones (which she regretted not building a Mute feature into), and her logic-solving abilities.

Now here she was like a cat caught in her own mousetrap, forced into one of GHQ's "runtime demonstrations" at the threat of her friends' lives. She was being treated like an errand girl while some bitch named after a dead programming language barked orders in her ear. An audience of faceless corporate quacks in a conference theater watched her under a microscope and obsessively evaluated how she typed, how she handled pressure, how she breathed, and how the light reflected off her miserable blue behind. She didn't live to be 19 years old in a world ravaged by an alien virus and enslaved by the corrupt little brother of the UN just so she could be a house pet entertaining the guests.

Her predicament was a strange one, like somewhere between a hostage situation and an interview for a new job. She felt like these working conditions were more suited for a robot that looked like a cute Asian girl rather than a naturally-grown real one with feelings.

It wasn't enough that they'd gotten her hub chamber all wrong. She had to put up with the added hindrance of dozens of tiny silver wires connected to the nodes on her jumpsuit. They dangled off her arms, chest, and down her back, scattering across the chamber floor in every direction. GHQ had jerry-rigged her into their system to collect data on every movement, vital sign, and organ function she made, exploiting her interface suit to function in ways she'd never designed it for. She only needed an operating system that tracked her basic hand gestures and translated them into machine commands, but that was too unobtrusive for her audience today. They wanted to be able to count and chemically analyze each individual bead of sweat collecting in her armpits. She felt like a meatball plugged into electronic spaghetti.

She sighed as she struggled to focus on the input console. Her 8-bit cypher hadn't worked. Her reverse binary trace hadn't worked. Her hex descrambler hadn't worked. She tried using a delayed Fibonacci sequence to solve the password.

[ACCESS DENIED]

"_This dumb pair of tits in spandex is the best hacker Funeral Parlor has to offer?" _Ada grumbled in Tsugumi's ear again. Her tone was getting noticeably more annoyed. _"How are they not _**in**_ a funeral parlor by now?"_

"_We're getting nowhere like this," _the voice of unnamed female GHQ official joined in the discussion. _"I recommend the patient for immediate magnoprosthesis."_

That word sent a shiver between Tsugumi's shoulders and down to the tail of her spine. They hadn't briefed her on what a magnoprosthesis was, but it sounded like something that wouldn't be pleasant for her or her very human butt.

Pretending she hadn't heard them, she quickly made another attempt to get through the entry screen.

[ACCESS DENIED]

"_My grandma could figure out how to program a holo-recorder faster than you can crack into one of the weakest guarded domains on GHQ's file," _Ada said with either disappointment or frustration.

"_Her operational efficiency is below 60%. The client is starting to run out patience,"_ a man's voice said on a separate channel.

Tsugumi couldn't count how many people were on her line. Every time the voice was someone new, a small holographic rectangle would appear on her left or right. All it showed was an anonymous personnel number and a red caption saying AUDIO ONLY. The things were chattering back and forth like a wall of talking bricks surrounding her. They were all class acts, too—Always careful to never address each other by any sort of names.

"_Heartrate and body heat are rising and we're not getting results. We're wasting our time letting her run without dampeners,"_ another woman's voice said.

"_I don't want to scramble her eggs just yet. I want to see how the genius uses her brain without the mods,"_ Ada replied to the unnamed man and woman. Her cryptic response relieved Tsugumi and haunted her at the same time.

"_Too many of these failed logins could put the entire system in lockdown," _said the voice of another man.

"_I'm fully aware,"_ Ada said back. She was scoffing slightly. _"This is my contract. I'll give Mittens one more chance before she needs to get her collar zapped."_

With all the threatening chatter around her, Tsugumi's hub was starting to feel even more claustrophobic. She frantically made another attempt at cracking the entry screen.

[ACCESS DENIED]

"_That's it. You're getting a shower, stinky," _Ada said with a grunt.

The screens circling the roof of the command chamber shifted open to reveal hidden cooling fans. An emotionless female system voice boomed through the speakers.

"_Magnetic augmentation system engaged. Please lean forward, stretch your arms horizontally, and keep all bodily sectors in an upright and conveniently accessible position. Thank you."_

Tsugumi's screams echoed off the narrow walls as she was instantly doused in a cloud of metallic particles. The particles instantly soaked through every clothing surface they touched and bound themselves to the organic tissue underneath. They also had some pretty caustic effects on the receiver's brain.

The mist cleared after a few seconds, revealing a strangely calm-looking Tsugumi. Her hair had a noticeably more saturated violet tone, and her interface suit endlessly twinkled on and off as if it were made of millions of active pixels pasted to her body. Her eyes flickered like a pair of computer screens flashing through their BIOS.

This was the harshest of punishments: Having her entire body repurposed as a living shell for proprietary software. All of her technical knowledge remained in her mind, but now it was organized and utilized by an artificial consciousness with no time for emotions while it was on duty.

Tsugumi looked at the still-active login screen in silence. She tilted her head and squinted curiously as she processed her thoughts. Her body had been augmented into a compact bio-semiconductor wrapped in static cling. Her brain had been augmented into a quantum computer.

"Let's try this one…" she whispered to herself with controlled excitement.

Her fingers flashed across the hovering keyboard faster than the human eye could perceive. She seemed to enter commands just by effortlessly looking at the console.

The holographic monitor suddenly chimed.

[ACCESS GRANTED]

The server was open. All of its contents were now were hers to take—Just like Tsugumi now completely belonged to the state.

She slapped her paw pads together and awkwardly held them like someone who wanted to clap in glee but forgot how to do the rest. The stack of holographic bricks sounded impressed as they quietly muttered to each other.

"_Imagine that. Pussycat managed to make herself useful. All it took was some fine tuning," _Ada said in her ear as a passive aggressive reward.

Tsugumi pivoted like her feet were motorized treads and offered her watchers a salute with a friendly smile.

* * *

_Author's note: Did you guys see Lunavero's cosplay of Tsugumi? It looks cool._


End file.
